After a short stint as a bond salesman upon graduating from Yale in 1919, Ross worked as an oil-field driller in Texas and a copper miner in Kentucky. Later, he became the public information officer of the NLRB, from 1934 to 1940, and then chair of FDR’s Federal Fair Employment Practice Committee (now a commission). Because Ross, like Orwell, was a product of elite schooling, he depicted knowingly the downsides of being elevated at others’ expense and the upsides of a conscience-driven dedication to fighting for workers whose “attempts to speak for themselves through organizations were being bitterly and successfully opposed by another kind of people I knew—the kind with whom I had gone to Hotchkiss and Yale.”
William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” running for president in 1896, had told a Yale audience that “99 out of 100 of the students of this university are the sons of the idle rich.” Two decades later, Ross, by then himself a Yale student, cited Bryan’s charge, noting that ‘‘nine out of 10’’ of his fellow students subscribed ‘‘to anti-labor attitudes with fervor.’’ A few dissenters supported the labor-friendly, immigrant “settlement house” movement, but “more common were those who thought that modern society was ‘rotten with altruism.’”
When he was working with the NLRB and the Fair Employment Practices Committee in the 1930s and early ’40s, Ross noted that his Hotchkiss and Yale classmates who’d become company lawyers contesting the government’s “rotten altruism” toward workers and the poor believed that
the technique of opposition to [banning child labor] imposes a necessity to avoid the directly sentimental issues of hollow-eyed children and instead to find another sentimental plane such as the preservation of the popular concept of what the Founding Fathers held dear [such as a lone worker’s supposed right to work or not] to brandish at judges who by the nature of their craft sit in terror of rendering decisions out of key with the revered past.
Ross described that “revered past” and its sequels not reverently but morally, even when doing so entailed judging himself:
Our Revolution was fought for the right to have and to hold. Our later genius was to lie in making more possessions than any people on earth had ever before enjoyed, and with our skill in production came necessity to distribute widely, to create new desires, and to speed obsolescence so that there might be a market for almost-new things.…
